alexvr

7 ms·

1.
by alexvr 10y ago
Just a friendly reminder that morality is just a little human social construct associated with the pain-pleasure mechanism that evolved to guide intelligent machines toward evolutionarily advantageous ends. It's not a fundamental &quot
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by alexvr 10y ago
Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with burning cat paws being unarguably immoral, unless you're talking about a completely fabricated, cognitive, social definition of morality. If you declare, rather arbitrarily, that anything
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by alexvr 10y ago
I'm glad. They are disturbing thoughts at first but then they become profoundly liberating. The "self" or "ego" is an illusion. It's very challenging to see beyond it when you're raised in the competitive,
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by alexvr 10y ago
I think it's obvious that there's also nothing wrong with thinking that nonexistent things are fundamental aspects of reality. You (not you specifically) can have mental models that are not in line with reality to your heart'
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by alexvr 10y ago
It's NOT objectively wrong to hurt people on a whim! I concede this very easily. It's not dubious whatever. It might be illegal or make you unhappy, but please let me know why this is objectively wrong. Do you think "wrong&qu
6.
by alexvr 10y ago
It's not wrong to stick a gun in someone's face. It's fine to pull the trigger too, if you're not considering the laws our civilization invented. It's all just opinion: You might not like being robbed, shot, or kill
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by alexvr 10y ago
A class on moral philosophy screwed me up for a while early in college. All the critical thinking and fancy vocabulary about the topic made me think morality was in some way real - I was all concerned about violating "moral laws."
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by alexvr 10y ago
Remind me how the correlation between openness to experience and IQ test scores suggests that seeking novelty might possibly increase your cognitive potential. I think I missed that part. With the same kind of "reasoning" I might
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by alexvr 11y ago
What? Why doesn't it work like this: Cell phones have SIM cards with an ID and a secret key. Cell service providers have a database of these SIM associations. Cell phones encrypt IP packets in their entirety with the symmetric key and
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by alexvr 11y ago
I find this deeply disturbing, particularly because there has never been a better time in recent history to NOT give a damn about how you perform in traditional school systems, if you are unlucky or ignorant enough to be imprisoned in one i
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by alexvr 11y ago
By the time kids who are taught to program in K-12 enter the workforce, knowing syntax, computer details, and data structures will be a thing of the past or a thing for really hardcore engineers who have to use a strict language like Python
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by alexvr 11y ago
I hope he gets out of this rut and finds a way to be happy and do more good things. It's a little painful to watch a smart guy with billions spend his time making gimmicky video games and partying and being generally unhappy.
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by alexvr 11y ago
Thanks for the warning. I was really hoping to see Halo or Quake or something, because in my experience practicing these games in a casual-competitive way, I hit a performance ceiling. In high school I played Halo nearly every day, and a br
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by alexvr 11y ago
Actually, most algebraic tricks in calculus, which are what make it challenging, are pretty unnecessary to know if you can program a computer or use existing math software. Conceptual tricks, on the other hand, which might be more aptly cal
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by alexvr 11y ago
I don't know what a gerund is, and I've never needed to except in 8th grade grammar tests, which I failed. Yet I got a 79/80 on the writing section of the SAT because my grammar is pretty solid. I've been in a remedial E
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by alexvr 11y ago
First, these are all exaggerated cases, inspired by experience. I appreciate the infrastructure a great deal, but I'm saying that there's a tremendous amount you can do if you focus on learning concepts and have a computer. School
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by alexvr 11y ago
It's really sad, but in one way kind of laughable, to see so many ostensibly bright students wasting their time cramming useless crap into their brains for AP history and calculus tests, and doing socially acceptable "extracurricu
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by alexvr 11y ago
Isn't this obvious to anyone who takes a little time to think about evolution and biodiversity? Yes, little changes caused by chance persist if they don't hinder the creature's ability to survive & reproduce. And these re
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by alexvr 11y ago
Kinda lame and not in line with what made PageRank so successful. Google should "not be evil" and have the decency to be as neutral as possible, allowing legitimate clicks and backlinks to judge the relevance of a website. If peop
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by alexvr 11y ago
I would occasionally copy my college papers into a text file and use my Mac's say command say -f paper.txt
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by alexvr 12y ago
This is kind of gimmicky. Most people are probably better off going to a 4-year university and studying CS/engineering/math/physics or something, and the few who want to learn in a nontraditional way and don't intend to
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by alexvr 12y ago
Maybe if they saw blatant, copycat visuals (ehem, Bing), but not name-wise: I've never seen someone try to start a search engine called something like "The Better Google"
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by alexvr 12y ago
Does he not have legal grounds to sue for trademark infringement if he so desired? Just because it's not a registered trademark doesn't mean it's not a trademark. It's not like it's called "Hot Sauce (TM)"
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by alexvr 12y ago
There's something really pleasant about graphics like those in The Witness and No Man's Sky.
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by alexvr 12y ago
My high school's student laptops were super restricted (I was suspended for installing Eclipse on an unrestricted computer), so I played with JavaScript a lot as a senior. I didn't have a good understanding of the virtues of class
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by alexvr 12y ago
Someday there could be gloves that allow you to feel these "holograms" using cables that prevent your fingers from moving up/down, etc. I also think this could be a short-term way to introduce full-body physical constraints i
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by alexvr 12y ago
My first instinct is to put it in a virtual world, but if it's smart enough, it could perhaps quickly realize the nature of its world and feign ignorance. Then, under the pretext of simply improving its own quality of life, it could te
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by alexvr 12y ago
Seems like a great app! Thanks for sharing
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by alexvr 12y ago
The biggest challenges for me as an intern were reading and understanding someone else's code (Python) and understanding the problem domain quickly and sufficiently. It's hard to judge how deeply you need to understand something b
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by alexvr 12y ago
I wasn't misled one bit. Why be so pedantic? Sure, you can call it a program, but in that sense you're also a program.

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